Abstract

Australia is an immigrant nation. Apart from its now small indigenous population, all of its 19 million population have immigrant ancestors. But though it has sought immigrants since earliest colonial times, its policies of recruiting and attracting immigrants have always been selective. In the twentieth century, it was notorious for its ‘White Australia’ policy which, for most of the last century, kept out people of non-European heritage. And in the twenty-first century, it continues to earn itself an ugly international reputation for its treatment of asylum seekers. Our topic today concerns the Australian government's practice of keeping out yet another group of people - in this case, people with Down syndrome...